Games I like: Doodle Jump

2010 -
12.27

The first mobile phone game I’ll be giving a nod to in the “Games I Like” series: Doodle Jump.

First off I’d like to comment about mobile games: They say that the iPod Touch and the iPhone have surpassed Nintendo’s handhelds in the size of the userbase. And for a long time people have been heralding them as the new portable gaming machines. Having a 1st gen iPhone I was excited to get in on the action, then very disappointed when I saw the games. Katamari Damacy, a game I loved dearly on the PS3, fell completely flat on the iPhone. Jerky. Slow. Hard to control. Tedious to play. And you’d think this would be a perfect game for tilt controls. In order to get the ball rolling enough, it was necessary to tilt the screen so far that it’s hard to see what you’re even doing. You end up hunched over the phone and leaning your torso way to the side whenever it’s time to make a big turn. I imagine you’d look like an idiot doing this at the bus stop. Super Monkey Ball (and others) suffered the same flaws.

Other games were far worse. Especially irksome to me were the games that had an on-screen d-pad, mimicking old Nintendo controls. FAIL! Not only have we wasted precious screen real estate, but touchscreens are NOT even CLOSE in responsiveness to buttons. It’s like a cruel joke. I really wish Apple would have came out with some gaming accessory that added a d-pad and a few buttons. They would have completely blew up the market, but their form-over-function ideology prevented this. (Apple has never understood gaming anyway.) Well, this is really a whole massive rant unto itself.

Doodle Jump has all of these things, and at it’s core is really an old arcade-style high-score slugfest with a cutesy veneer of hand-drawn art. The objective is simple: go up. Fall off the bottom, you die, just like old 2 player Contra! The Doodler finds powerups to give him a boost (springs, trampolines, propeller hats, and a jetpack) and there’s obstacles to avoid (monsters of various shapes/colors, black holes, UFOs, etc). There’s also a dash of trickery thrown in with the platforms themselves, like moving ones, breakable ones, and ones that explode a few seconds after appearing.

The formula doesn’t change as the game goes on, however as the score gets higher the pressure definitely builds. Getting a very high score demands a high amount of concentration, as the platforms begin moving faster and there are fewer stationary green ones. A big part of it too is the pressure you begin to put on yourself as you watch the score get higher… Don’t F it up!!

The best part is the competitive element. You don’t need to be a veteran analog-stick jockey to pull off a high score on this game–anyone can play it, and with enough desire, beat you. I’m both sheepish about/proud of my long career as a “hardcore” gamer, and I’ve been getting in a score war with my girlfriend, someone who never owned a console.

On my Droid X I initially held the record at 59k, until she took it one day with a dramatic 76! I was like, okay, you’re ON! After failing early on for a few tries, I broke into the high range and almost beat her. At 74k I dropped out on purpose, a dare to her; I knew she could get a much higher score (and I also knew she’d be mad at me for beating her so soon!). She was a bit upset that I lost on purpose, but I said well, I wanted to give you a chance to beat your own record. Aaaand I was right. The next day she put down a whopping 102,140. I’m so proud. I knew she could do it!

The 102 still reigns… for now. I will have to work hard if I want to reach over 100k. There are plenty of random ways to die.

On a final note, I’ll comment that I like the Android version better than the iPhone version. It lacks the dark blue platforms you have to move with your finger, the sections where handwriting tells you to stomp the monsters and the wide number of themes (I never use them anyway), but I think it handles better (though that may be the accelerometers in the Droid X versus a 1st-gen iPhone), I like the Android sounds better (they’re slightly different) and best of all, you don’t have to aim when you shoot! Technically, I know aiming adds another dimension to the game and makes it more of a challenge, but in practice, it just gets tedious. It’s more fun to blast away indiscriminately. After all, this is a mobile game, not Team Fortress.

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